I’m building a new e-commerce setup here at wpdude to sell my downloadable video courses, and as part of that project I’m using a new plugin called Cart66.
I thought a plugin review was due.
Author: Neil Matthews
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What Is A CDN?
You may have heard talk about CDNs they are all the rage for websites. In this post I’m going to explain what a CDN is and what it can do for your site.
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Integrating WordPress With Email Systems
Overview
This is a protected post for members of the WP Owners Club.
In this session I will show you how to integrate your email service such as Aweber or Mailchimp with WordPress.
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How To Stop A WordPress Plugin Auto Updating
Here’s the scenario,you’ve coded up a change in a plugin. Three months later you are doing your regular plugin maintenance (you are keeping your plugins up to date aren’t you? Security reasons you know) and you overwrite the customised plugin ARRGHHHH!!
All your hard work is gone, you will have to recode the changes and I bet you have no documentation or memory of how you did it.
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Share Worthy Content
This is a guest post by Tommy Bussey The SEO Coach
Social media is truly changing the way things are done online. Companies are beginning to truly wake up to the idea that it’s not enough anymore to just broadcast a message to an audience, and today, being successful on the web is all about how well you engage people in dynamic dialogue, which is driven by contributing to conversations, participating, and influencing the buzz that is going around for merging trends. So what makes for great share worthy content?
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How to Create a Favicon in WordPress
This is a guest post by Rebecca Jones, see her bio at the bottom of this post
Favicon is a small icon that displays bright on the browser URL bar, bookmark list or navigation tab. Favicon (the short form for favorite icon) in all its certainty will bring a drastic modification in your website’s outlook, if created with thorough research on the interests of the visitors to the website.
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Refreshing The Google Index After Pharma Hack
The pharma hack is one of the most stubborn hack attacks I have to deal with on WordPress sites for my clients, I’ve written more about it here in my post The WordPress Pharma Hack
Once you have fixed the hack, there is the lingering problem of getting Google to update it’s index and remove all reference to viagra, cialis and all the other disco drugs these scum buckets are trying to pedal.
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Before You Upgrade To WordPress 3.3
STOP!
Before you upgrade to WordPress 3.3 watch this video. The update has a lot of changes and I’m seeing a lot of plugins crashing my clients WordPress sites.
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The Business Of WP
A bit of free software is providing a lot of people with a lot of business opportunities.
In this post I want to talk about the business of WP, and where money is being made supporting and developing WordPress for the million of sites built upon open source software.
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Refreshing Your Feedburner Feed
Have you ever put something out there on your blog and realised it was a mistake. You quickly delete it and think all is well, only to find that the mistaken post has appeared in your Feedburner feed and you cannot get rid of it.
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Case Study: Flash Video and iThings
I was working with a client recently who has a lot of traffic to his blog from mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads, he also has a lot of video which was being displayed in a flash player.
The problem – site visitors could not see his videos.
Flash Doesn’t Work On iThings
Apple and Adobe agreed to have a battle, said Apple to Adobe you broke my brand new rattle (excerpt from Apple through the looking glass).
Apple and Adobe had a big falling out recently when Abode created a development process where applications could be run in flash on iThings. The problem is, they could circumvent the Apple app store with this process.
Apple protected their platorm/spat the dummy to stop uncontrolled |un monetised apps (delete as applicable) and as a result removed support for flash from their mobile devices. Here is what Apple have to say http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/.
A lot of WordPress video plugins which use flash will not show video on iThings.
How Much Traffic Is Mobile?
You may be thinking meh! I don’t get much traffic from mobile devices, but I think you will find you do, a quick check of my stats in Google Analytics shows that 3% of my traffic is from mobile devices. Not a huge amount, but significant enough to take notice. Some of my clients have mobile traffic at 10-15% now that is worth taking note of.
This will be growing at an alarming rate over the next few years so it is imperative that you make your site mobile ready.
Many Video Plugins Use Flash
Many of the popular video plugins like WordTube or any of the flowplayer plugins use flash to show the videos on your WordPress site. They take the native format wrap it in a video player then stream that content in flash.
Try to view that on an Apple product and you will get an error.
The Solution
You need to stream your video in a format iThings play nicely with, this could be a native foramt like mp4 or from a platform the Apple likes.
Here are some of the ways you can get around this
YouTube – embed your videos directly from YouTube rather than using a flash player. Appel devices recognise YouTube content and open it in the YouTube app that comes with the device.
Stream in a format acceptable – You could encode and stream your videos with Apple’s Quicktime format http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/embed-quicktime/ but this may cause you issues on other browsers without the correct plugin
Find An HTML Video Plugin – A quick search on the plugin repository and you will find plugins like this one http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/html5-and-flash-video-player/ (caveat I’ve not used this one before, don’t give me grief if it does not work).
HTML5 For The Rescue
The new HTML5 standard has video streaming built in, thsi will solve our problems eventually. many plugin developers are scrambling to to an html5 re-write, but this doesn’t help us right now.
This will be the way forward but the plugins are not here yet.
What I Did For My Client
We swapped out the videos to embed YouTube. I installed and configured the Jetpack plugin and we used the YouTube embed short codes.
He was already using YouTube to host his videos and JW Player to play them, so the chaneg was not that huge just a little tedious to swap over all the code.
Wrap Up
Even the most ardent Apple Fan Bois cannot think banning flash is acceptable, it’s a format generally accepted across the net, but when you buy inot a closed eco-system like Apple’s Apps they get to call the shots.
People love their iThings (I’m and iPhone fan) so you are swimming against hte current if you try to make them match your site choices, my suggestion adapt and make your site mobile ready.
A Mobile Ready WordPress Site
I’ll be talking more about making your site mobile ready in the very near future, it’s a huge thing as more and more people consume internet content, why not join my mailing list to keep up to date with my new posts.
